The
late Pamela Spence Richards of Rutgers University had it right when she said
that I was bitten by the Russian bug in the spring of 1996 when the H.W.
Wilson Foundation and ALISE sent me to Moscow and St. Petersburg as a
Teaching Fellow. Between June 1996 and June 2002, I served as the faculty
sponsor of the UCLA-St.
Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts' international exchange
program to increase the international diversity in our graduate
programs. It was a small, but truly bilateral program, with two excellent
visiting students from SPB (i.e., Elena V. Valinovskaya, 1997 and Inna
Ilinskaya, 2002) as well as our own Kelly Kolar, who went to SPB to use
archival material, advancing her thesis work in Winter 2004; she is the
former curator for the Wende Museum
of Cold War in Culver City and currently an assistant professor at
MTSU, having been a doctoral candidate in Russian history at UCLA, where her
dissertation addressed the historical development of Soviet archives.

In
recent years, I have been involved with the Fulbright Commission in Russia,
reading proposals for the Russian Visiting Scholar Competition in 2004; and
Fulbright Graduate Student Competition, 2005, 2007-2008, 2008/2009, 2010/2011,
2013/2014 as well as the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Competition, 2006-2007,
2007-2008, 2009-2010 and 2010-2011. During the 2008/2009 academic year, I
hosted Katerina
Yefimova, a reference librarian, from the Scientific Library of the
Ural State University in Yekaterinburg as a visiting Fulbright scholar.
Between 2003 and 2008, I served as one of the local host coordinators for
visiting VIP Russian librarians through the Open
World Program for the Library of Congress; through December 2013, I
continue my international interests as a Vice President of the board of
directors for the International Visitors
Council of Los Angeles.

At
the 1996 exit interview with the Dean of the SPB program, Dr. Yelena
Sudarikova gave me a booklet indicating that her program was named for N.
Krupskaya (see photo above); based on that information, I became fascinated
with the influence that Lenin's wife had on Soviet librarianship and returned
several summers to pursue this line of research (see below). If you want to read
about my experience using Russian libraries, click here.
Of course, I quickly discovered several other influential women who shaped
several generations of library practitioners in Russia. You may also find the
MLIS thesis work of one of my students, Dr. Elena Boudovskaia (now at George
Washington University), of some interest--"Knowledge is Power: Images of
the Book in the Soviet Ideological Poster, 1918-1991" (PowerPoint).

In
one of the most exciting developments, the Turkmen State Publishing Service
has agreed in principle to publish a new, third edition of the
English-Russian Dictionary of Library and Information Terminology.I have a modest UCLA ASCOR grant to hire a
Turkmen translator and hope to deliver the revised dictionary in late 2014.

In
the early summer of 2011, I attended the three-week intensive NEH Summer
Institute on “America
Engages Eurasia.”And,
returned to Ashgabat in September 2012 as a senior Fulbright scholar (see Ampersand
article).

"Education
for Librarianship in the Russian Far East: An Update on Vladivostok State
University of Economics and Culture," Journal of Education for Library
and Information Science 47 (Spring 2006): 160-164.

An English-Russian Dictionary
of Library and Information Science. Los
Angles: ITA Press, 2013; first edition, St. Petersburg, Russia: Professiya
Publishing House, 2005. This work has been found “valuable” enough to appear
in other countries as The English-Russian-Bulgarian Dictionary (Sofia:
Izdatelstvo za Bukvite, 2010) and as the Russian-English
Dictionary (SPB: Professiya Publishing House, 2013) with three new
editors.

"Recent
Developments in the Russian Far East: The State of Education for
Librarianship." Journal of Education for Library and Information Science
44 (Spring 2003): 137-52. (pdf)

"Education
for Library and Information Science in Russia: A Case Study of the St.
Petersburg State Academy of Culture," Journal of Education for Library
and Information Science Education 39 (Winter 1998): 14-27. (pdf)

In
November 2000, the U.S. Department of State asked me to lecture in Russian
Far East, notably at Vladivostok and Khabarovsk; Dr. Ilya Levin, Public
Affairs Officer for the US Consulate,
wrote of this trip: "I can't think of another example when US taxpayers'
money was better spent. Thank you for visiting the Russian Far East."
The Embassy asked me to return to Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island in October
2003. In 2005, I served as a short-term Fulbright Lecturer during the Spring 2005 at Vladivostok
State University of Economics and Services.

In
addition, I have worked with the U.S. Department of State on matters of
national security, mainly focusing on the state of library and information
economies in developing countries such as Eritrea, Tanzania, Turkmenistan
(2005 and 2009), Uganda, and Zambia. I value the role of cultural diplomacy and wish to believe
that peace can come about through global understanding. See, for example,